My university years were rich, developing, healing years, and I thank God for the many wonderful friends I made in that time. Most of them are crazy gifted as well, and Hannah is one those. We lived on the same hall our freshman year, majored in the same department and worked on our campus newspaper together. She is a wise, compassionate, thoughtful, kind woman, and one of my dear friends. I think her words today will be timely ones for many of us as we remember our first months with a newborn. I hope that these are words of healing, hope and freedom for you as they were for me.

Hannah Hall loves roller coasters, sushi, sunshine on her face and writing with a really good ink pen. She and her husband, Josh, have three kiddos- ages 1, 3 and 5- and live in Arkansas where, sadly, roller coasters and good sushi are hard to come by. Her first book God Bless You and Good Night was published by Thomas Nelson in September.

Dear Hannah,

Oh, darling, you were a wreck, weren’t you?

It was hard. Honest-to-goodness hard. Those first weeks (and months) can be ruthless. No mom who’s being truthful would say otherwise.

But you still thought it would be easier, didn’t you? That it would come more naturally. Instead you struggled through every day and dreaded every night. The feedings were especially hard then, when J casually snoozed through your quiet sobs and had no idea that you were drowning.

Why am I not better at this? This is supposed to be natural.

Your mind viciously wandered back to a conversation you had with a friend some months before your first babe was born. She was talking about another friend, someone you didn’t even know, but you will never forget what she said.

“Being a mom doesn’t really come naturally to her, you know?”

You had nodded your head in mock agreement, completely ignorant yourself of what “being a mom” entailed but unwilling to admit it, lest she turn her wagging tongue on you.

But her words settled heavy. Festered. Grew. Suffocated.

They gnawed at you in that moment of nasty, juicy gossip but then, once she was born, you wept over their brutal honesty.

God created women to be mothers. But look how you struggle!Your mom was a natural. Why aren’t you? Look! You didn’t even get your first motherly instinct right.

And it was true.

You and J had decided not to learn the sex of the baby beforehand. You wanted the surprise. The “It’s a boy!” moment at the hospital. And that’s what you expected: “It’s a boy!” Every single person you encountered during your pregnancy took one look at your growing belly and declared with absolute confidence, “Oh honey, you are having a boy.”

And then there you were, in the hospital, holding your lovely, perfectly pink and healthy baby girl and all you could think was “you were supposed to be a boy.”

Was it a defunct motherly instinct that expected a boy or just an impressionable naivety clouded by the opinions of others? Either way, you already weren’t a natural and she was only moments old.

And so it set the tone of those first few days and weeks. Nursing, napping, swaddling- all of it was difficult. You loved her desperately, but, goodness, how could something so small have turned your life so upside down?

You put on a happy face. You smiled appropriately but sobbed later when well-meaning visitors gushed over how wonderful it was to be a new mother. And you were drowning.

You were not a natural.

But you are three kids in now. You survived that first and find yourself in awe that she will soon start Kindergarten. You look back on who you were five years ago and can remember the pain so fresh. But you have grown and changed and learned.

And now you can say with honesty and grace for yourself, “No it didn’t come naturally. Dying to yourself never does.”

Because that’s what having a baby is. It is teeny, tiny bundle of lessons on how to die to yourself. How to give up what your self wants for the sake of someone else. And the self never wants to give up, to die.

You forgo rest for countless nights to feed a demanding human being while the flesh screams, “Sleep!” But you don’t sleep. You feed.

Not natural.

Re-route your entire life to accommodate their sleep schedule. The self cries, “Not fair!” But you do it anyway.

Not natural.

Listen to her cry at night and cry harder than she is because you know she must learn to sleep no matter how awful the learning is, and the flesh begs, “Don’t do it!” You hold fast and she learns.

But it’s not natural.

While birthing a child may be a completely natural process biologically, to do the deed of a being a mother requires the most un-natural giving up of one’s self. It is learned and trained and struggled through and prayed over.

And it will always be hard. But you do it anyway because it’s worth it. Because there is something greater than you going on here. Because Little Lives are watching, and they see it all.

They see how you loved and nursed and prayed and made mistakes and asked forgiveness. They see how you died to yourself for their needs day after day.

And you know what they will say? One day, when they’re grown, they’ll say the same thing you said about your mom.

She was a good mom. She loved me. She sacrificed for me. “

She wasa natural.

Love,
Hannah

This post is Day 25 of 31 Days of blogging in October. I am writing this month about my first season of motherhood, sharing stories and lessons that stayed with me from that time.

(New to this series? Start here and follow the links to each day’s post.)

My zone is rarely clean, it doesn’t look like a pinterest craft, it’s not matching or clever. My zone is a hint of a plan mixed with some spontaneity against a backdrop of disorder with splashes of creativity and colour and a huge helping of deliciousness and the sounds of guitars, piano and voices. If there’s learning involved, I’m thrilled. If we’re outside, fantastic. If it’s fun, even better. If we’re laughing, consider it the best thing ever.

That’s my zone for now, and living in it brings joy to my soul, life to my days as a mom and if I’m reading the laughter in their eyes, wonder to my sons.

Yesterday it was a late afternoon spent running around in the wet, semi-dark yard. With milk in hand, of course.

Baby watched from the porch. He is generally content anywhere but ridiculously happy outside.

Little Boy and I kicked a ball and leaves around.

Today we spent the morning in a nearby shopping centre, only to come home to 13 C (55 F) and sun, and when in Sweden in October, we chase the sun. So I told Little Boy were were going to have an outdoor picnic, ran inside, took his IKEA table out (it’s a bit too wet to sit on the grass), grabbed a candle, his little pumpkin and last night’s soup and we picnicked outdoors.

And we feasted on my chicken meat ball, noodle and swiss chard soup. Not true. I feasted on it. Little Boy ate some of the noodles and a bit of the meat balls. We’ll try again next time, but the soup was seriously delicious.

The table has oily hand print marks and dirt, the candle got blown out, and I still needed to deal with whining about food. Oh and breastfeed a baby while try to eat soup at the same time.

But the wind blew leaves down, and Little Boy gazed at them falling with wonder in his eyes. The sun warmed us up. We had fun. It was a great moment, and now a few hours later, a treasured memory.

This is my zone, and it feels good.

What’s your zone? What’s the space in which you are fully yourself? How can you invite your kids, family, friends and people around you into that space?

This post is Day 24 of 31 Days of blogging in October. I am writing this month about my first season of motherhood, sharing stories and lessons that stayed with me from that time.

(New to this series? Start here and follow the links to each day’s post.)

Hey, you over there, can you hear me? Yes, I heard the lady in the church crèche, too. Her son was talking at 10 months, and I saw your heart filling slowly with fear. You wondered about Little Boy – nine months at the time – and why he didn’t have words yet. You’re feeling afraid, afraid that you haven’t read enough, talked enough, spent enough time together, and you’re wondering about development, intelligence, autism.

How is comparison working out for you today? Here’s my opinion – not very well.

You thought you were great at not comparing him to other babies, but that’s only because when you compared him at the beginning, he was doing fine. There was no reason to worry and lots of reasons to feel like you were doing a great job.

Because that’s what comparison was about, wasn’t it? You needed all the evidence you could find that you were an adequate mother, that you were figuring out this baby thing, that you were doing a good job.In the absence of a progress report, salary or job performance evaluation, what you had instead was a baby, and there had to be a way to find out how he was doing you were doing.

Was he rolling over in time? Yes. Was he sleeping well at night? At the beginning, yes. Was he napping? Like a star. Did he cry for long periods of time? Never.

You desperately needed to know you were doing a good job, and he made it so easy for you to do that in the beginning. Comparison seemed like the only way you could know for sure that you were enough. You were enough because he was doing well. You knew he was doing well because he was winning a game.

Here’s the thing, Devi. Children aren’t trophies, they are your treasures, your relationships, your gifts, but they are not trophies. They are not evidence of parenting successes or failures. Please don’t set yourself and your son up for a co-dependent future. He can own his successes, and he can own his failures. Your successes and failures are yours to own.

The more you feed the comparison monster, the more it will grow. Put yourself around comparison-oriented people, and the monster will thrive.

You don’t want this way of life for yourself, and you don’t want it for your children.You long to be the mother that only you can be because you are unique, with a unique past, moving toward a unique future. And you want your children to live free without the fear that they can’t meet a certain standard set by other people or even set by you. Little Boy, he wants to know that he can live, grow, thrive in a way that is his alone, not the way the sons in other families live. No other family in the world is like yours, every family has it’s special purpose, so don’t lock yourself into the box that comparison will build for you.

So relax a little. You’re free to be a good mother, you’re free to be the mother you are supposed to be, the one who cooks with her boys, the one who doesn’t have lots of rules, who sings and dances daily, the one who reads a lot, who doesn’t give baths, the one likes to sit and think and think and think and so many other quirks and oddities and specialities and normalities. This is you. No need to be anyone else or try to meet someone else’s standard.

When you compare yourself, when you compare your children, this is what you are doing – making someone else’s life and standard the best thing and measuring your worth and your life to that standard. Whether you succeed or fail in the comparison game isn’t the point, as long as your way of measuring success is comparison, you will just keep having to do it. This is why it is so destructive – it keeps you coming back for more.

And one day it will wear you out. You will get tired of succeeding in your comparisons because it means you won’t get close to people. You will get tired of failing in your comparisons because it will make you feel worthless. But before it does that, it will wear out your kids and give them lots of reasons not to trust you. Every child gets to the point when they realize a parent is measuring their worth against someone else, and it immediately leads to feelings of inferiority, guilt and resentment.

No comparison, Devi. Never. Ever. No one has a perfect family, and your family relationships are not your achievements. When you understand who you and Husband are, how you parent, who your kids are and what makes them tick and build the family only you are supposed to be,you give yourself, your husband, and your boys the gift of freedom.

Set your family free from the burden of comparison and watch them thrive in the light of grace and truth.

This is the inevitable post about marriage, or the inevitable post about toilet paper in marriage. I report you, decide, but either way, We Are Going There.

Husband and I have different bathroom habits. We side-stepped the how-to-squeeze-a-tube-of-toothpaste debacle, and for a while I thought we were superior to every other married couple for it, but in the end the toilet paper was my downfall.

I put the toilet paper where it should go: on the silver toilet holder, located to the right of the toilet slightly behind the seat, but if he started a roll, it always went on top of the washing machine directly to the left of the toilet seat. For some reason this misplaced roll began to drive me crazy.

I don’t know what the first real negative thought was, but somewhere along the way it morphed from a minor annoyance into a full-fledged source of resentment.

I assumed he was doing it on purpose (assumptions are usually fueled by accusations).

He knows I want the toilet paper on the roll. Why does he want to frustrate me on purpose by putting it on the washing machine?

I made more assumptions.

He is probably trying to play a game with me, like he wants me to put the toilet paper on the roll instead of doing it himself, he thinks his will is stronger than mine and that I will cave first. He has no idea how strong-willed I am. I will never cave.

There were times when the toilet paper was left on the washing machine for weeks, and every time I looked at it, the roll was the silent reminder that Husband and I were locked in a power struggle: Who was going to win? Who was going to move the toilet paper to its proper place?

A few times when I started a roll, I put it on the washing machine on purpose. (Warning: Extreme Neurotic Thinking Ahead.)

That will show him! I’m above needing to follow even my own rules! I’m going to try to drive him crazy by putting him in the position of having a roll on the washing machine that I put there and now he’ll have the pressure to put it on the holder!!!! I beat him at his own game!!!

On days when I was already mad about something else, the toilet paper on the washing machine taunted me- He doesn’t care about you, he is not interested in your marriage, he doesn’t love you.

I didn’t say anything about the toilet paper for a year-and-a-half. Finally we were in Australia in January 2012, eating lunch with my sister and her fiancee and having conversations about marriage. I decided to volunteer the story about the toilet paper roll as an example of not talking about things, but I was going to do it in a “ha ha, so funny” way so that Husband would realize how much it bothered me without having to talk to him about it.

(I believe counselors refer to this as passive aggressive behavior.)

After I told the story, Husband looked at me like I was strange, and said, I put the toilet paper on the washing machine because it’s easier to reach. I thought I was making life easier for both of us.

Just to recap in case some of the details got lost:

For a year-and-a-half, I saw toilet paper on the washing machine and felt like I was having a marriage crisis, resented my husband and thought badly of him.

For-a-yar-and-a-half, Husband put toilet paper on the washing machine because he thought he was making our lives easier.

I wasted a lot of time on toilet paper.

It’s no secret that marriage is tough after kids, and there are plenty of studies out indicating that marital satisfaction plummets post first baby. Believe me, this little blog post is not going to tell you anything you don’t already know, and I certainly have no great secrets about how to make marriage work after kids (only that you have to make it work, you’re welcome).

Marriage is hard work for every married person; it doesn’t matter what you believe, what kind of life you have, where you live or what your histories are.

So here’s my lone nugget of wisdom, maybe even truth, and God only knows my life would be better if I lived by it:

If you hear an accusation about your spouse in your head or from another person, you have only two options ever: 1.resolve it immediately in your head and heart so it does not come between the two of you or 2. talk about it with your spouse.

Dismiss or talk. That’s it, no exceptions. (And dismiss means do not think about it ever again.)

Living this out is ridiculously difficult for me partly because I am easily prone to judgment; not everyone is, your character flaws are different from mine. But the few times when I’m able to pre-empt judgment, accusations and negativity by talking to Husband about whatever has been bothering shows me that it is worth talking and having those conversations I would rather avoid.

The seemingly worst talks – and after kids, the talks are also at the worst times – lead to a richness of friendship, and a depth of love that is better than anything I could have ever hoped for. Honesty and vulnerability with your spouse is worth it.

What is something you need to discuss with your spouse? Something he or she does that eats away at you and you can’t put it aside? Isn’t it time to sit down and have the conversation? Or can you find away to put it out of your head?

This post is Day 22 of 31 Days of blogging in October. I am writing this month about my first season of motherhood, sharing stories and lessons that stayed with me from that time.

(New to this series? Start here and follow the links to each day’s post.)